blah, blah, blog

Disclaimer: Don't know much about geography, and I'm not an expert on anything Kuwaiti, so as you read, please pardon my ignorance, and don't quote me on any of this. Thank you for your interest.

As I understand it, this is the last "weekend Thursday" in Kuwait. Until now, Kuwait has had its weekends set up to include the day before the Moslem sabbath, and the sabbath day itself. That was Thursday and Friday. I didn't even know that the work week went from Saturday till Wednesday until shortly before I arrived. I guess it's the same in Dubai, probably all over the Middle East. But Kuwait will be switching this weekend. From here on out, the weekend will fall on Friday and Saturday instead. I heard the government decided to switch it because of something to do with the stock market, and that makes perfect sense, since money is the whole point here in Kuwait.

I have been in Kuwait since Aug. 19th, and today is the 30th. The jet lag is over, the unpacking is done, the euphoria is over, and I'm fully engaged in my teaching job. I already feel like everything I can say about Kuwait is already cliche, because I've been making the same comments as the other new teachers have been making for the past 11 days, and the teachers who have been here for three or five or seven years seem to be making the same comments as well.

In a nutshell, Kuwait is strange place, a "boil" of teeming humanity in the most unlikely and inhospitable of natural environments imaginable. Mother Earth must have had a crazy idea when she gathered a full tenth of her biomass muck that would turn into oil reserves into a spot that would become a tiny nation of feuding desert tribes, eventually the most outrageous rags-to-riches story in the history of the planet. I was recently told that a mere forty or fifty years ago, the Kuwaitis were sword-bearing tribesmen, and that all their clan warfare persists today in the form of vicious family feuds. Kuwaiti culture, I was told, is a revenge-driven culture. Who knows if that's true, but it is something I will probably not forget hearing. I suspect that if it is true, it is quickly evolving into something else. There is tremendous wealth here, and I think managing their money is the full time job of many Kuwaitis.

Today the new hires went for medical tests and fingerprinting, and when I got back to school I told my assistant that to me it felt like an experience of apartheid. I had to explain to her that apartheid was the system that existed in South Africa in which ethnic communities were segregated and treated with blatant, unhidden racism. When we got to whatever facility it was where the medical tests were being done, there were hundreds of south Asians, I would guess mostly Indians, waiting. Hundreds. We arrived, Canadians, Americans, Brits, Australians, and (ironically) South Africans, on our little shuttle bus and were ushered past every one to the front of the line. It feels weird to have this undeserved priviledge. My assistant told me to be thankful to God for my good fortune, and I said, "Should I really thank God for an unfair advantage?" She agreed with me when I said it like that. The poor people here feel glad, I'm told, to have a chance to work and not starve. Regardless of how little they are paid or poorly they are treated, they are probably seriously better off than they would be in their home countries. Personally I find that I get great pleasure from giving them tips. A quarter KD (Kuwaiti Dinar) for a waitress or a driver results in such gratitude, it makes you feel like Santa Claus. It's a little twisted, I think, to bask in the satisfaction of doing a good deed for such a cheap price. It's Marie-Antoinettish. But I'd rather be guilty of that than not tip. The Kuwaitis do not tip. This I was told by the one Kuwaiti man with whom I have had a real conversation. The conversation was, incidentally, in Japanese. The world has always been strange, but it's getting stranger, isn't it?

I hesitated to do a blog for a number of reasons. First, I didn't want to take on the commitment. I figured once I started I might feel obligated to keep it up after I got tired of doing it. Secondly, it's very hard to say anything to everyone -- think about it. We all have complex lives with all sorts of interpersonal connections and relationships. You talk about different things with different people with whom you share different aspects of your life. Blogs are very public. Whether you make joke or express a personal concern, you are literally holding it out for the world to see. And that brings me to the third reason for hesitation. I have grown up in the United States, where free speech is enshrined in the constitution and much taken for granted. Here in Kuwait, it is possible to get oneself in hot water for saying the wrong thing. Shortly after arriving, I read in the Kuwait Times that a reporter had been arrested for his blog in which the Emir of Kuwait was insulted... and it wasn't even the blogger himself who wrote the insult - it was someone else who left a comment!! Both of them were arrested. The reporter was released after a couple days in jail and a public outcry from Kuwaiti citizens. So you see, self-censorship is necessary here. I will have to be cautious. To be fair, it's not just because of the freedom of speech issue. I wouldn't like it if someone talked about me in his/her blog, regardless of whether it was positive or negative. But it makes me wonder how long life as we know it will continue with our sense of having a right to privacy. So, even though I will feel like telling family and friends at home about my new teacher friends and new students, things will have to remain very general, out of respect and consideration.

Though it is not a workday, the school is going to be open today for teachers to prepare for the first day of classes on Sunday. I'm going in to work on curriculum and lesson plans. So far I've had very good feedback about my ideas, and I think I'm going to have a successful time with my job. My fears about the professionalism of the school have been abated. Though my school serves students with learning disabilities, it has an excellent reputation here. I recently learned that I'm going to have one of the grandchildren of the royal family in one of my classes.